By Shibaji Bose, PhD Researcher, National Institute of Technology Durgapur, India

To unveil the photos and narratives through participatory visual methods by co-producing with a population that is in the throes of climate uncertainty is a challenge. But when the same population is faced with an unprecedented phenomenon of drought and flood, it has its psychological traps as we tend to focus more on the dramatic unfolding of the extreme heat, hailstorms, floods, and pestilence than on the everyday stressors.

In the ANTICIPATE project, we aimed to capture the spectrum of voices and experiences of shocks and stressors amidst hierarchies of caste, ethnicity, religion, and gender through the visual methods of photovoice, an embedded researcher photography and photo elicitation method.

By deliberately slowing down the pace of the research for a long time, we were able to follow and work together with the local communities as their lives, livelihoods, uncertainties, and windows of opportunity unfolded from one season to the other. The visual co-production techniques enabled us to unpack the multidimensional experiences of variability (which turned out to be the daily challenges rather than the extremes), capturing the hidden, latent, and visible aspects of change.

Through engaged documentary photography (a form of photography where the research team critically engaged with all social intersections, including gender, caste, class, age and religion in the village), we developed extended photo stories that reflect the daily lives of the local communities. This covers the spectrum of weather variability, including heatwaves, droughts, and erratic rainfall patterns experienced during the monsoon and, more recently, in the winter and spring seasons.

Our learning from the decentralised nature of embedding visual methods is as follows:

1. Photos taken by the researcher, who had spent considerable time in the village, captured important moments shared by the women and elderly who did not have a smartphone or did not have time to engage due to their unending daily chores and preparations for the next extreme. These photos served as an entry point for initiating conversations about the community’s experiences with all the intersecting social locations in the village.
2. The embedded visual methods unpacked hidden narratives like challenges, importance, and needs, particularly in the face of climate uncertainty and the corresponding strategies critical to sustaining our livelihoods and preparing for the future.

Our learning through visual methods research, which complemented the social science research, is conveyed by the journey of realisation. We started with unpacking extremes – using both floods and drought as our entry points of conversation. However, we soon realised that even these terms were too homogenous and abstract for the local communities. In many ways, the photo-elicitation process challenged the researcher’s gaze and nudged us to rethink our vocabularies of inquiry and exploration (Bose et al., 2023). This process made us recognise the importance of the everyday life of extremes, and what happens between them is as essential to unpack as the episode itself. We were able to unpack the social constructions of extremes to think about preparedness from the ground up.

Reference:

Bose, S., Sheth, M. and Srivastava, S. (2023) Co-producing visual evidence to unpack co-located hazards. IDS Blog https://www.ids.ac.uk/opinions/co-producing-visual-evidence-unpacking-impacts-of-climate-extremes-in-rural-gujarat/

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